On being cancer free in a pandemic

26 years ago yesterday I woke up at 4:30 a.m., put on my rattiest pair of jeans, and went to a specialty hospital to have surgery. I had a mass in the orbit of my left eye. I had been assured it was likely benign, but they couldn't confirm until it was removed. The procedure for a biopsy was the same as for excision, so there was no reason to not just have it taken out. Besides, the mass was growing pretty quickly and I was starting to look like Marty Feldman's cousin, let alone having some unsettling visual problems, like partial blindness in my left eye and diplopia.

About 12 hours later I woke up in recovery, pushing the nurse away as she adjusted my oxygen mask. I looked like I'd been badly beaten, but was assured everything went well and I would heal quickly and easily. There had been some alarming moments in the surgery, but I was okay. That night in the hospital, a nurse named Steve? Bill? sat next to me and held my hand when I was afraid. I went home the next day.

A few days later I went back for a check-up and biopsy results. That was when the doctor told me that the mass wasn't benign but a fairly rare and (at the time) not well understood malignancy. Cancer. Long story short, there was some rigamarole about next steps, but I was fine. I still am. Some good stories have come out of it and I've learned a few things.

A year later, 25 years ago, I threw a party, my re-birthday. I kept that party up for ten years then decided I'd had enough and didn't need to do it anymore. I would do it again in 10 years for my 20th re-birthday.

Twenty years later, April 18 was 21 days after Kevin died from cancer. I didn't throw a party.

In all honesty, now I don't really remember to notice the day for my own sake. I'm reminded by something about the Oklahoma City bombings, which occurred on April 19, 1995 (remember when this kind of thing seemed impossible?) or, while I still lived in Boston by the Marathon or Patriots Day. If anything, when I did remember, it became another trigger for grief because I survived cancer and Kevin did not. Mostly it's just another day, which is probably good.

This year is different. It is, of course, different for all of us and in so many ways. Some of us are just learning about grief and trauma, others recognize some of it as a familiar ride. For all of us this is unprecedented.

I woke up yesterday not thinking at all about the date. Something was nibbling at me, something I should remember. At some point, I think while Charley and I were walking, I remembered. Oh. Right. Today I am cancer-free.

I'm not sure what the larger point is here, other than wanting to note it and recognize that against the greater backdrop of global grief and loss, it is both very small and not small at all. I keep thinking about A Blessing for the Wedding by Jane Hirschfield and Elizabeth Alexander's Praise Song for the Day, both poems about the ordinary-ness of the extraordinary and the extraordinary-ness of the ordinary.

Hirschfield reminds me that living and dying happen all the time, that there are unknown joys and tragedies every single moment of the world. So it is with my own cancer experience, with loving and losing Kevin, with loving and losing so many, with this moment when we are all suspended in time between life and death, staying home to stay safe or struggling to breathe.

Today when someone you love has died
     or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
     or someone you will not meet has been born

Every single one of those moments matters whether or not they impact me directly.

It is Alexander who comforts me. I wish I could share her words with my 26 year old self, who was so very scared. I don't know if they would have helped then, or if they will help now, but

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, 

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, 
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Today I am still here, amidst the certainty of death and loss, praise and courage, the un-noticed moments that compose our lives. Today I am 26 years cancer-free, half my life passed ahead of that frozen moment. I did not know then what was to come, all of the love and fear and strangeness and wonder. I still don't know. None of us do. But here we are.

Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. I love you all.
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